


Wolf Slayer

by Reavv



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Bilbo Baggins, Fell Winter, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hobbit Culture & Customs, Hobbits, Politics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-27
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 08:57:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11917500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reavv/pseuds/Reavv
Summary: The winters in the Shire are normally mild and short, perfect for games involving sleds and skates, for fireside stories and the like. They are a welcome respite for the farmers and tradespeople: where the work involves more paper and pen than labour. Festivals pop up, inns sell hot drinks and food by the barrel, and fauntlings run amok with pink noses.There’s only ever been the one winter, though, that sticks in Hobbit memory.





	Wolf Slayer

**Author's Note:**

> I actually stated this one before my shadow of mordor kick, so uh, it's long overdue

The winters in the Shire are normally mild and short, perfect for games involving sleds and skates, for fireside stories and the like. They are a welcome respite for the farmers and tradespeople: where the work involves more paper and pen than labour. Festivals pop up, inns sell hot drinks and food by the barrel, and fauntlings run amok with pink noses. 

There’s only ever been the one winter, though, that sticks in Hobbit memory. 

—

Belladonna Baggins goes down with wolf teeth in her throat. The sword she was carrying is slick with blood, the corpses around her evidence to the fight she put up before the cold slowed her limbs a little too much. Bungo Baggins fares no better, though it is an illness that sweeps him away days later, his wounds feverish and yellow. 

Bilbo Baggins survives, although the Shire can’t say it was a better fate. 

His mother’s bloodied sword in one hand, and his father’s prized frypan in the other, by the time he stumbles into the Tuckborough he is a slight, haunted thing. He has a pocket full of wolf teeth and a makeshift cloak of fur around his shoulders, and when his cousins rush to his side it is with bated breath. 

The bloody gash that sweeps across his face and side stains the white snow red. 

Bilbo Baggins becomes a Wolf-Slayer, but it is at a terrible price. 

—

No one is untouched by that winter. Food is the first to go, as a Hobbit’s stomach knows nothing of rationing. When it becomes apparent that the wind and the snow and the bitter cold won’t let up, that they will burn through the stockpile of wood and cheese before the end, some try and leave. 

Bodies are discovered months later, eerily preserved, collapsed by the roadside. 

—

The Baggins are lords, technically. It is not something that has any real meaning in day to day life, but in times of strife they are the ones others will look towards for guidance. 

It is not without merit. Bungo himself holds one of the largest libraries in the Shire outside of the Thain’s house, and Belladonna was renown for her worldly ways. Belladonna even holds the title of the Thain’s favourite daughter, although she is not in line to inherit. When the storms become so fierce that it becomes apparent that no help is on the way, it is to them that their neighbours turn to. 

The Baggins’ pantry is not that much larger than any other hobbithole. It is with that thought that Belladonna takes down her traveling gear and heads out into the storm. 

There are no prey in the woods, anymore, but there’s plenty of wolves. 

Wolf meat tastes mostly like lean rabbit, Bilbo finds out. 

—

The death toll is high. Higher than hobbits have any means of coping with, unused as they are to things like war and disease. They are a soft people, but the winter makes them hard. 

Bagshot Row, the street on which the Baggins family live, does better than most. Belladonna herself saves the lives of nine families who would have otherwise starved to death. Bungo’s library did its fair share of work as well, having a great selection of tomes on healing and survival, as well of course, as story books to keep the mind in decent spirits. 

Perhaps if the winter had lasted only a reasonable amount of time, that would have been enough. But although the snows recedes a fair bit and the days lengthened a little, the bitter cold remained. 

And so too did the wolves.

—

Bilbo can no longer remember who brought the idea up, of leaving. The smial would hold for a few more days with strict rationing, but to survive for longer would mean more than what meat Belladonna could coax out of starving wolf bones. And then one of the families gets sick. 

They have no medicine, nothing to stop the spread of an illness with how weak and hungry they all are. One illness becomes two, becomes five. Soon they are looking at dying not from hunger or wolves or cold, but of disease. 

It has been long enough though that there’s hope of greener hills just over the horizon. 

That if only they can brave the dark and damp of the forests to head into Tuckborough, they might find something better. Food, medicine. Wood dry enough for a fire strong enough to beat back the bitter cold. 

Belladonna goes, of course, because she is the only one brave enough to carry a sword and use it, and Bungo goes because to let his wife go alone would be a hardship he isn’t prepared to face. 

Bilbo is not meant to go. Someone needs to look after the smial, and the people there. A Baggins must remain at Bag End. 

He sneaks out anyways. 

—

Bilbo is young, not yet out of his tweens, but the Shire agrees that in the years of the Fell Winter he has aged fast. When he arrives at Tuckborough the Rangers are only a few days behind, and it is with their help that a supply train is established throughout the Shire. 

It takes weeks for his wounds to heal, but before the first stitch is closed he is already on his feet, guiding the men to where he knows still living families are holed up, helping keep the wolves at bay with steel and fire. 

His relatives protest, saying he is too young, but the Rangers accept his help gladly. He is old enough to join if he were a man, they argue, and Hobbit ages aren’t so different in the end. 

In the end even the Thain agrees that things are dire enough to warrant Bilbo’s aid. Perhaps it is because he doesn’t act so much like a tween should, ever since his parents died. 

Those months, he learns a lot. In an effort to forget his grief he shadows the Rangers with steadfast devotion, learning more from watching them than from any sort of tutelage. It is there that it becomes evident that he inherited more than just his mother’s eyes. The bow comes naturally, but it is in his swordsmanship that his Took nature shines. 

“It is not a style that would be effective if you were a man,” one of the Rangers notes, watching him clean his mother’s sword at the end of the day. 

“Your height gives you an advantage at stealth,” another comments, following with footsteps only slightly louder than Bilbo’s own down the darkened forest path. 

“It’s a pity you don’t have more reach,” someone mutters as Bilbo darts into the fight, weaving out of the way of sharp teeth. 

He needs to be quick, and brutal, and a little reckless. He has to get in close to deal damage, so he becomes good at silence, at stillness. Poison, derived from his mother’s namesake, traps laid with his father’s steadiness, even, to the disgust of his relatives, the recruitment of two small wolf pups. 

Bilbo wouldn’t say it was pity that made him pick up the orphans, after stumbling on the still cooling corpse of the mother. He has no real sympathy for the species that killed his parents. 

But he has seen the damage that they can do fully grown, and with orcs moving into the forests he wants that sort of power at his side. It helps that the two are small enough, for now, that they appear more like their southern cousins than the dark-tainted northern breed. He teaches them stealth, and to hunt, and by the time they are grown enough that they come up to his chest, they are an old sight in the Shire. 

Whatever evil their species hold, it is no match for good companionship and hobbit meals. 

—

In the end, the winter lasts two years. 

By the time the river melts and the last of the orcs are pushed back, most of the bodies have been found and buried. His parents are entombed with more respect than usual: more than one Hobbit owes them their lives. 

Bilbo holds his parents legacy, and it is a heavy thing. 

Bag End is emptied and restored. He accepts the condolences and thinly veiled questions about inheritance, but at the end of the day he finds it hard to pry his hands away from his mother’s sword. 

When the Thain invites him to his hold, to help with the rebuilding and (to the whispered glee of the neighbourhood) receive more teachings on management and leadership, he agrees. He knows most think he’s now being groomed to inherit, that he goes to find grander things that what he might otherwise; but more than anything he is looking for some sort of stability that isn’t wrapped up in his parents’ absence. 

The wolves, now fully grown and mostly content being fed table scraps and frollicking in the now warm meadows, go with him. It becomes common to see the two large shapes, easily overshadowing most hobbits, standing guard over the Thain’s office. It's a powerful sight, and although there are grumbles and more than one traumatized flinch at their sight, no one protests too much. 

In the end, the wolves were a lesser evil than the things still lurking in the dark.

It is only then, having seen his people’s acceptance of the beasts, does Bilbo wonder at their names. As pups he’d only called them “the wolves” or if the occasion warranted it “those flea-bitten troublemakers”. 

There had been a moment, grief ridden and desperate for a sense of the familiar, that he debated naming them after his parents. It felt like too much of a sacrilege, in the end. 

It is the Thain who names them in Bilbo’s stead. Adamanta, named after the Took who was known to be as hard as her namesake, and Hildigrim, after Bilbo’s uncle, whose name was as fierce as the man who wielded it. 

“Theirs was a different time, of course,” the Thain remarks, lighting his pipe, “being fierce meant a passionate personality, not one of combat.” 

Bilbo takes the rebuke as it is meant, able to tell it is not quite disapproval in his grandfather’s voice. There was a time, long ago before the Shire, that hobbits would be named not for their Took-ness or their Baggins-ness, but for their survivability. When they needed to be fierce, and poisonous, and hard as diamond. 

But that time is long past, and it is good to remember that peace does not mean forgetfulness. 

—

Bilbo’s rooms in the Thain’s hold are decorated with mementos of the winter. His collection of wolf hide and teeth, of course, but also ugly metal helmets and shields, a dirty orc blade, some odds and ends gifted to him from the Rangers he’d worked with. 

He learns the names of all the active Bounders, visits the Sheriff in his office with the towers of paper, writes letters he knows have little chance of reaching their destination to the Rangers. 

With the Thain’s guidance he starts tidying up Bag End’s finance, sends letters of condolences and gratitude to his multitude of relatives, family friends, and people of importance. He helps organize a committee to help with the spring planting: the farming fields are wrecked almost beyond salvage, and they need to work fast to get the planting done at all. Aid is lent to all the farming families, and a guard is set up in the hopes of forestalling any poaching. 

It’s here that Bilbo remembers how to be his father’s son. Where he takes up the mantle of Gentlehobbit once again, and leaves at least a part of the winter’s violence behind. 

It was his mother’s legacy that let him survive the winter, but now in the springtime it is his father’s that lets him live. 

It is with this thought that he hangs his father’s frypan in the centre of his room, even with its dented metal and blood stained handle. 

—

Bilbo doesn’t talk much about the wounds he gained in the winter. The bite to his face was mostly a glancing blow, and in certain lights it’s hard to see the scars anyways. The bite to his side is a little worse off, a ring of semi-perfect teeth marks that heal twisted and ugly. 

He counts himself lucky that there was very little permanent damage. His range of movement is still intact, and besides a few cosmetic differences, he truly feels as if they have changed him very little. 

And if his scars ache in the cold, well, he figures that’s just appropriate. 

The Shire is a little more hesitant. Scars are not common, even for those who survived the winter. But Bilbo has good social currency, and it takes very little to make his neighbours overlook it all.

And as the years go by, and most of the horror fades from people’s minds, he starts to look forward to the inquisitive questions posed by curious fauntlings. It is at least a change from the silent pity of their parents. 

—

When Bilbo turns thirty-three, he goes back to Bag End. He’s learnt all he can from the Thain and he misses home. The smial is just as he left it, looked after as it has been by the Gamgee family, but time has softened his memory of the place. He still feels the shadow of his parents hanging over the place, but it is muted, manageable. 

His majority means that even his more scheming of relatives are unable to protest too much. Which is good, because the Sackvilles have been grumbling about leaving Bag End empty for so long, and wouldn’t it be better to have a family live in such a big smial, instead of a lone bachelor? 

Luckily there’s not much they can do, and now that Bilbo is back there’s even less. 

He concentrates on fixing up the smial instead, expanding the pantry and adding more storage. He has to convert one of the sitting rooms into a stockpile before he feels truly comfortable with his provisions, but the end result is such that Bag End ends up being one of the best prepared smials in Hobbiton.

The shelves are filled with medicine and survival gear, one corner holds more wood than a home normally goes through in a year, and his weapons are tucked out of the way. The only thing he keeps out in the open is his mother’s sword, which gets hung up in the study, just above his father’s desk. 

The wolves he gives the smoking room, used as he is to only bringing out his pipe where the wind can carry the scent away from him, and not alert delicate noses as to his whereabouts. Even now, when years have passed and his wounds have healed, some part of him is expecting howls in the forest and the stench of orc blood in the air. 

—

Years go by. Bilbo is both respected and the subject of much gossip: both a reputable business hobbit, and someone who regularly takes walks in the forests after dark. The wolves keep to his side, but the lavish lifestyle of no longer having to hunt for their own food makes them lazy and slow. 

He continues his tutelage under his grandfather, although he is perhaps the only one who doesn’t think it’s so that the old man can finally retire. Bilbo knows the Thain isn’t ready for life in the countryside for quite a few more years, and he’s personally of the mind that he’ll end up picking someone more suited to politics. Bilbo can deal with management and finances, is good at seeing the way things connect and the effects of small details on larger systems, but he has very little patience anymore for things like inheritance disputes and the petty greediness of those who want his favour. One of his Took cousins will no doubt do very well in his stead. 

He takes to writing down his days, the things he learns and improves upon, the different projects he picks up. He becomes acquainted with travel, the slow, meandering progress of the road as he journeys to Bree for supplies and a better blacksmith. It becomes common enough to see him on that road that his neighbours start asking for him to help ferry goods to and fro. He becomes somewhat of a known name in the business world, not only for his own endeavors, but also for helping others seek fortune outside the Shire. 

So it is not with annoyance that he surveys Gandalf when he comes searching. 

“Mother talked of you fondly,” Bilbo says, inspecting his tobacco. The blend, an odorless version of the kind he used to use with the Rangers, still needs some tweaking. He’s finding the potency offset by just how fast it burns. 

“I should hope so!” Gandalf huffs, but it is with a smile. If he’s surprised by Bilbo’s memory, he doesn’t show it. “Your mother was a good friend, a good friend indeed.” 

“Are you here to pay your respects for her then? I’m afraid us Hobbits do grief differently than men, there is no burial for you to visit,” he says, lighting the pipe. The smoke drifts out with a white puff, dispersing quickly in the wind. He wonders to himself if there’s a way of making a smokeless blend as well. Useful on the dead nights where smoke will hang in the air for longer. 

“No, no, I am here for you, my boy. I have come with an adventure,” Gandalf says, leaning on his staff. The pointy hat tips a little to shadow his eyes, and Bilbo eyes him suspiciously. It is a move designed to incite mystery and excitement, and it is not something he appreciates. 

“Not really in the market for adventures, right now,” he says. The wizard’s expression is sharp, and it puts him on edge. What kind of adventure would Big Folk need a hobbit for? Unless it’s a party, he’s not sure he wants to know. He has a feeling whatever adventure the wizard has come for is the sort of thing that most Hobbits would be ill suited for. 

“You do not wish to even hear what it is?” 

Bilbo hums, biting down on his pipe and appraising the wizard with his own sharp expression. Gandalf has been conspicuously absent from the Shire for many a year now, and he had almost not recognised him. His mother’s stories had mentioned him quite a lot, of course, but those had be censored for young Fauntlings. 

“Why me?” he asks instead, leaning back on the bench. The wizard straightens a little, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. 

“The company I am with is looking to hire another, and it is a task that requires a Hobbit's touch. I knew Belladona’s child would be a perfect fit,” Gandalf says, slowly. He hasn't really answered Bilbo’s question, but Bilbo only hums some more. 

“I will listen,” he says, standing, “but only if I hear of this adventure from this company of yours.” He has the feeling he won't be getting much information from the wizard. At least no information that will paint this supposed adventure with all the facts he needs. 

It would be rude not to hear what they have to say, however, even if it’s just to craft a better refusal. 

“Good! They are not far behind,” Gandalf says with a smile, as if Bilbo has given his answer already. 

“I shall prepare for guests then,” Bilbo sighs, puffing at his pipe one last time. The blend is already on the last dredge of its life, and he despairs of ever finding the right recipe. He might be in need of finding a new plant to use as a base, instead of the hobbit-grown tobacco he is so fond of. 

“You’re welcome to wait for your company here, or if you like there’s a lovely party happening at the Inn,” he says, standing up, mind mostly still on the task of where to find a new cutting. 

It is Gandalf’s turn to hum thoughtfully.

“I still have business to attend to, unfortunately, but I will be back later in the evening. The company should arrive before then.” 

Bilbo pauses. 

“For dinner then? How many?” He turns to ask, but Gandalf is already gone, the faint trail of dust kicked up by his staff the only evidence of his arrival. There is a sense of foreboding left in his wake, and Bilbo frowns.

Something tells him he might have gotten himself into more trouble than he’s prepared for. 

—

The hobbit is golden haired and straight-backed. Perhaps the size difference should make Balin feel the more powerful one at the table, but the calm eyes only serve to put him off balance. 

A thief supposedly, according to Gandalf, but the hobbit is dressed like a lord who just happens to love gardening, some strange mix between opulent and practical. Red brocade broken up by well-worn leather, gold thread lining thick cotton. He doesn’t appear to have the sort of desperation Balin is used to seeing in thieves, and the wary eye he keeps on the door has less to do with fear and more to do with irritation.

“How many again did you say you are?” the hobbit asks, although it is with a sort of defeated air that says he already knows the answer. 

“Thirteen not counting the wizard,” Balin says, again, snatching at another sweet roll. At the least the hobbit can cook: Bombur will appreciate another hand at the fire. 

“Right,” the hobbit says faintly, turning towards the kitchen and the roasts sitting on the low table. There’s a good spread of food laid out, but it would not be enough for even five dwarfs. 

“Right,” the hobbit says again, slightly more steady. “Well, you might as well start digging in, I’ll not be able to entertain you. If you need me, it seems I’ll be in the kitchen.” 

Balin watches him wander back around to where he can just make out the sound of a kettle steaming is coming from, and sits back with a frown. It gives him time to inspect the—he hesitates to call it a house, and hole just make it sound a less opulent than it actually is—hobbit’s home. Warm colours and fabrics, from well cared for wood to plush furs, and there’s almost as much carving on the walls and ceiling than what you would find in a dwarf's workshop. It itself, most of the what he cans see is not much of a surprise from his idea of a hobbit’s dwelling. It seems like the kind of place a soft, naive folk would prefer, comfort over anything else.

But—

There’s the glint of a something else, underneath it all. It is not only the hobbit himself that appears strange, there’s something about the place that seems off. 

There’s the sound of a crash from the kitchen and then his host’s cursing. 

“Adamanta, no—” the hobbit snaps, just before a giant white shape comes bounding out, a second not far behind.

Balin jerks up, chair crashing to the floor behind him, as he sees the two giant wolves. Large, larger than he’s ever seen, with white coats of fur that he now sees look very similar to the furs on the floor. 

“That wasn’t for you,” the hobbit says, pulling a rabbit's foot out of one of the beast's mouth, and Balin has to blink at the nonchalance of putting any limb that close to a jaw filled with teeth longer than the hobbit’s hand. 

“Oh,” he continues, upon seeing Balin, weapons drawn, “they are perfectly safe, I assure you.” 

Before Balin can think to answer, perhaps in the negative and with much questions as to the hobbits sanity, there’s a thunderous knock at the door. 

“Your companions, I presume?” the hobbit says wryly, already moving to answer, leaving Balin with wolves almost as large as he is, whose eyes seem to regard him with hunger and disdain. If he believed the beasts capable of emotion, he would even think one of them to be laughing at him. 

He’s suddenly much more hesitant about the wizard’s supposed burglar.


End file.
